Social media giant Facebook has launched three new features which are built specifically for the Indian market and will be rolled out globally later. The new features include allowing users to put up voice posts and to save photos and videos for later.
Users will now be able to save the photos and videos they capture through the Facebook camera, where only they will be able to view them after they log into their account or can save photos to share later.
“It is common for people in India to share devices…people have told us they want to save their photos to a more personal space that is tied to their identity and not just the device they are using,” said Connor Hayes, Director of Product Management, Facebook.
Facebook will also allow voice posts, letting people “share in the moment” without having to share a photo or video. This could also help people who can't necessarily write in the language they want to share in.
“Another really important thing that we’ve learnt from WhatsApp is that voice messaging is an increasingly popular way for people to communicate when they don’t want to type out messages,” said Hayes.
Users will be able to put a background colour to audio posts or a background picture. According to Facebook, a voice post on stories can be up to 20 seconds. However, there is currently no time limit for a voice post that is shared to News Feed, but of course the recording time is restricted by the local storage on the user's device.
In the coming weeks, Facebook plans to roll out story archive feature that will allow users to save the stories most important to them. After a photo disappears from your story, you can find it in your story archive — a place only you can see.
Being able to view some of their old stories, said Hayes, was an issue that several people have raised. Facebook will now provide users with an option to turn out Stories Archive in their settings.
Facebook has more than 217 million monthly daily active users in India, which simply means over half the Internet population of the country is on Facebook.
